Carey: a postseason history

I did a shot-by-shot breakdown of Carey Price’s 2010 playoff performance and looked at his save percentage by every possible split. Working from the NHL play-by-play sheets, I was able to amass a lot of data about the shots he faced: situation, shooter, shot type, distance, and location on the ice. Below, you can see the variations in his save percentage from situation to situation.

I’m going to be taking a break from blogging for awhile to focus on some personal things, but my goal for 2010-2011 is to perform this type of tracking and classification for every single shot faced by Habs goalies. There’s just one thing missing from the NHL play-by-play sheets: shot trajectory. They don’t log the path a shot takes towards the net. So, from the logs alone, I have no visibility into whether a shot is going high glove side or low stick side or five hole or whatnot. To overcome that, I’ll chart each shot and then reconcile my numbers with the NHL.com play-by-play data. A fun challenge!

Anyway, see you in the new season. Enjoy Carey’s 2010 playoff numbers for now: